Jack Sharry: Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. I attended the MMI annual conference as I always do or try to do. I attended in the fall and found the research conducted by Broadridge for the MMI to be quite interesting. Tim Kresl and Ashley Wood spoke from the main stage on their findings from the Broadridge Annual Investment Advisory Pulse Survey conducted jointly by the MMI and Broadridge Financial Solutions. Their research explores key trends, challenges, and outlooks within the asset and wealth management industries. We’re gonna get into that in a moment. They focused heavily on the impact of artificial intelligence, product innovation, and the needs of next generation investors. I was particularly struck by the two different views, that of the wealth manager versus that of the asset manager in their analysis. They were codependent on one another. So we’re fortunate to be joined today by Tim and Ashley on our podcast and on these topics and we’ll dig in here to their findings and observations. Tim is a managing principal and head of the US client success at Broadridge. Tim’s expertise is around market strategy and quantitative analysis. Ashley is a managing principal in data analytics at Broadridge. Ashley brings a strong background in client engagement and innovative financial solutions. Tim and Ashley, great to have you on the show. Glad you’re here.
Tim Kresl: Thanks for having us.
Ashley Wood: Thank you for having us.
Jack Sharry: So Tim, why don’t you kick things off and give us a high level view of Broadridge, what you all do. You do a lot of different stuff and where you all fit into the Broadridge system. What’s your role there? And also if you talk about your relationship with MMI and this particular research study, bring that all together if you would, just to kick things off.
Tim Kresl: Yeah, happy to. When you think about Broadridge, it’s a fairly large and complex organization. We do a number of things across the broader kind of corporate structure. Where Ashley and I focus is in our data and analytics group specifically. And what our data and analytics group does here at Broadridge is we try to help enable asset managers to create more data-driven distribution strategies. We do everything from back office optimization and outsourcing through the middle office kind of sales, integration, and synthesis, all the way through front office optimization, segmentation, scoring, and distribution strategy work. And so that’s where Ashley and I spend the vast majority of our time is partnering with asset management distribution organizations to help them optimize their distribution systems in a variety of ways. And we’ve been doing that, I’ve been doing it for about eight years now as part of Broadridge. We started partnering with the MMI a number of years ago, but we started conducting the Pulse survey in partnership with the MMI about three years ago at this point. And this was an exercise where the MMI was really looking to collect some more feedback from the membership around what’s happening in the industry that then they could share back with the membership as a value add. That’s obviously one of the critical pillars of the MMI in general is sharing insights across the group, which is something that I particularly value in the partnership we’ve had with the MMI in the past. And so they wanted to survey the membership. We happen to have a lot of experience in both survey design, implementation, and insights. And so they had approached us to be able to partner on this front. And it’s yielded a bunch of really good data and insights that are all presented at the MMI Annual Conference each year and are available on their website for members, which I would encourage everybody to take a look at the full results as well.
Jack Sharry: And we’ll dig into some of those insights and some of those findings in just a moment. So Ashley, please fill us in on your role at Broadridge and with this survey. And also if you’d frame what you hoped to get out of, what you had hoped to get out of this survey and some high level observations of what you found.
Ashley Wood: Yes, so it’s always interesting when Tim and I do introductions back to back, especially when I go second, because I need to spice it up and not regurgitate everything he just said. But it’s very similar, as Tim mentioned, we work across the sort of value chain, if you will, but we’re disproportionately focused on those front office executive level decision makers. I have been at Broadridge actually just coming up on one year now in January, but have an extensive background in the industry and with asset management leadership prior to that. So energized, right, excited to have the access to the data, the solutions, the capability sets that we have in-house at Broadridge to really help clients make more informed decisions and drive business outcomes. From the survey, obviously we’re hoping to get some provocative dialogue going, some active discussion points. As you mentioned, the divergence or sometimes lack thereof between the asset and wealth manager communities is critical. And there’s some really interesting threads that we can pull on there. Additionally, at Broadridge, we also interview advisor and investor communities. So if you layer on sort of two additional persona types, to me, that’s fascinating, right? You get kind of a strong approach to really what’s most top of mind, what keeps people up at night, right? Where are we aligned and ultimately where do we need to garner more buy-in and more alignment going forward?
Jack Sharry: That’s great. Terrific. So Tim, our audience, as you know, is comprised of executives and industry leaders around strategy, product, platform development, sales, distribution, technology, and marketing. And on both sides, both wealth and asset managers. And of course, as we mentioned, they really need one another and work very closely as we know. So what are some of the key findings from where you sit? What do you think your audience finds most valuable that you think maybe they might have missed, but what are some of the findings that you think to be important for our audience to understand?
Tim Kresl: Yeah, there were really a myriad of really interesting findings in this year’s research. And so let me focus in on two. And both of them are areas that highlight some of the unique distinctions between asset management and wealth management responding, which was particularly interesting. So the first is in terms of asset manager and wealth managers perceptions of advisor needs. There was generally a lot of alignment in those areas, but there were two interesting areas of divergence there that I think are worth highlighting. The first is asset managers tend to believe that advisors need a lot more help with portfolio construction and management. That’s why we have this proliferation of kind of portfolio construction roles over time, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. And so wealth managers tend to believe, no, no, no, generally advisors have that covered. We’ve got in-house services that they can use for these types of portfolio construction services. And so I think that’s a really interesting gap. Now, ultimately, neither of these respondent bases are actually financial advisors. And so it’s both perception of what advisors need. I think advisors are likely somewhere in the middle, ultimately. But I think that’s going to dictate what type of content is ultimately getting created and delivered. The other area that’s really interesting there is tax optimization. So wealth managers far and away, the number one need that they had articulated was designing tax efficient portfolios. Tax optimization is critically important, both from the wealth management home office personnel perspective, but actually when we talked to advisors, they also say tax optimization is one of the biggest areas of need that they have in their practice today. And so I thought that was particularly interesting. Not to say that asset managers didn’t think tax optimization was important, but it was kind of middle of the pack when we looked at that from an ordinal ranking perspective. That just has to do with the perspective that they’re taking, right, of delivering packaged products versus looking at it from a total portfolio, total account, or total household level, right?
Jack Sharry: I’m going to want to come back to that because I think that’s pretty important. Should it be in the product? Should it be on the platform? But I’m going to hold off because Ashley may have her own perspective on this, but I’m going to dig into that because we’ve had other friendly competitors of yours on our show who’ve made the same statement. So it’s clear it’s how everyone’s thinking at different levels and in different ways. But Ashley, how about you? What are some of the key takeaways? And then I’ll circle back on the tax optimization topic with both of you.
Ashley Wood: Yeah, so I might tackle that from a product perspective. And there will be parallels, of course, here to the tax optimization thread. I’ll table AI for now, although we should talk about that at some point.
Jack Sharry: Definitely, we’ll come back to that for sure. This would not be a podcast if we did not talk about AI.
Ashley Wood: Yeah, we can’t claim relevancy without…
Jack Sharry: Right, right. We’ll get there. Our audience is hanging on like, let me hear what you have to say. Anyway, go ahead.
Ashley Wood: That’s the more sobering thread of concerns about tech spend, but that’s neither here nor there. We’ll get there. From a product perspective, though, we’re actually seeing quite a bit of alignment in terms of the core needs that asset and wealth managers are expressing. And those really revolve around a couple of key themes. Lower cost solutions, right, which is probably not surprising, but tax efficient, tax optimized solutions is a critical need that’s come to the forefront there as well.
Jack Sharry: And when you say solutions, are you talking about a specific product by name, if you would?
Ashley Wood: Exactly. So investment solutions and we can. I’ll elaborate on that. The third piece I would just note is this concept of more tailored and customized solutions at scale. So what I mean by that, if we break that down into individual sort of product options that are driving that general theme, flight to active ETFs, I think as everybody knows, that’s a very well established trend at this point. Private markets is also at the forefront of this trend. And then I would note from an ordinal perspective, we see separately managed accounts as well as direct indexing in a bit of a lock in that sort of… position, if you will, but with a disproportionate wealth manager focus, particularly on solutions like direct indexing, which really epitomizes, you could argue, technology aiding customization at scale. So that’s… coming out just from a product landscape perspective.
Jack Sharry: For both of you, let’s dig in a little bit further because I appreciate and understand clearly the product aspect, that’s available. It’s on the shelf. All of that is where money is flowing, I assume. Maybe you want to fill our audience in a little bit more on that. But between the two of you, talk a little bit about when you say solutions, often it goes beyond product, especially when it gets to tax optimization. Really, if you’re going to improve outcome, you should do it across multiple accounts, there’s lots… there’s qualified accounts and taxable accounts and they have different tax characteristics at play there if you will. There are also other ways that you can enhance outcome at the platform level. So dig into that again. I like that the distinction you’re making between the asset manager versus the wealth manager. Maybe, Tim, kick it off and then, Ashley, love to hear your thoughts, you know, just how does that play going beyond the product, which we know by name to the solution or what I would call a multi-account or multi-product or multi-element solution, capability solution. So Tim, why don’t you kick that off.
Tim Kresl: Yeah, I think many advisors have started to think about it more from a solutions delivery perspective, primarily because one of the major trends that we’ve been tracking for a number of years at this point is financial advisors are currently in the process of flipping their core value proposition to and they’re shifting it from what was once a very investment management heavy value proposition now to being much more holistic financial planning. And holistic financial planning encompasses a tremendous amount more than just portfolio management and investment selection. Now, ultimately what that does as they’re shifting their value proposition is it necessitates a wider variety of skillset that that advisor needs to have in order to support that value proposition. And… towards teaming in the marketplace where we’re seeing these larger and larger teams, especially in the high market. The other thing that it does is it shrinks the amount of time that they have for investment selection and manager selection. And so if it’s going to be shrunk, the amount of time, they need to be thinking more about package solutions, as well as kind of outsourcing core elements of investment management and you get a variety of kind of product trends that cascade off the back of that, including the use of model portfolios, but also I would argue the use of more SMAs, direct indexing for large swaths of… portfolios. And so I would argue that that’s kind of the shift that we’ve experienced over that time period. And that’s what we see as the driving force behind it as well. Although, Ashley, I’m curious to get your comments there too.
Ashley Wood: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think anyone would argue that the direction of travel on advisors being forced to defend their alpha, if you will, in different ways and in more holistic ways. And the sort of product selection side is an increasingly smaller piece of that. So that’s certainly coming through here. I would come back to also just the concept of how does this benefit, right? And this is a critical point for asset managers and wealth managers to be thinking about the talk track and the education around how do some of these individual product solutions actually benefit an advisor’s practice holistically. You know, specialization at scale is a term that Tim and I throw around a lot. It’s probably becoming a bit of a buzzword in this, in this industry at this point, but that’s really the key theme here from our perspective is how do you get more tailored and more individualized, but in a scalable, sustainable way, because advisors are just being asked to do more and more and more over time and the scope of the role frankly is only continuing to increase. And really we haven’t talked too much yet about investor demographics, but the data that we see on that side with next gen investors and wealth transfer and all these sort of larger macro themes suggest that these trends are only gonna be amplified going forward as we move down into the younger tranches of investors who have fundamentally different needs.
Jack Sharry: So there’s a variety of ways to improve outcome. I mean, I’ve always thought about what we’re discussing now is if you’re going to improve outcome, it’s an issue of investment cost. It’s around managing tax and concurrent with that is risk because as you… sort of flip sides at the same coin, yet another way to improve outcomes is Social Security, but that’s for another day. The point is that if you’re going to improve outcome beyond the markets, as we know, that’s pretty hard to distinguish yourself there because you may be good one year and not so good the next. So I’d like to hear your comments, but my assumption is that advisors are thinking less and less about how they’re going to beat the other advisor. They’re more about the services they offer. It sounds to me, and I had talked to others on the podcast who agree, and my sense is you do as well. If you’re really going to improve outcome, you’ve got to consider taxes. The biggest cost of all the different costs when my… So maybe Tim, why don’t you talk a little bit about that. And one of the things we haven’t touched on, is we talked about the product side. And I know you do a lot around product, but what about the tools side? More and more tools are coming out, more and more platforms, more and more around capabilities. And once again, that distinction between what the asset manager is looking for or is looking to provide and what the wealth manager is looking to needs or is building themselves. So fill us in there. And Ashley, I’m gonna ask you the same question, give you that heads up. I’d like to get your perspective there too.
Tim Kresl: Yeah, going back to the first part of your question. So if we look at the types of solutions, it was around types of solutions, right? Sorry, I just wanted to…
Jack Sharry: Yeah, just there’s more and more… Well, I’ll pick some names that people know. 55 IP as an example, Canvas, but places like that or capabilities like that solution oriented that include product for sure, but optimized in some fashion or another.
Tim Kresl: I would say that you’re spot on in terms of, where can we provide differentiation from others? The other thing that I would add there though, and I think this has been the driving force behind some of the trends that we haven’t talked about yet is, yes, it’s harder to differentiate based on, alpha, right? Based on out competing the guy down the street, but there is still very much a need to be able to keep up with the guy down the street. And so I think that there is a kind of some FOMO associated with this as well. And I think that somewhat predicates or rather somewhat front runs the trend towards private markets that we’ve seen as well. And the further expansion of private markets allocation is investors have really high expectations from an investment return standpoint right now because of the historical market that we’ve been in, the only way to be able to keep up with those rising expectations are either to be able to seek alpha in outperforming actively managed strategies, which is very difficult, but not… people aren’t doing it, or to be able to allocate to other markets that are not the traditional public markets. So things like private market allocations, crypto allocations, what have you, and then tax optimize that entire suite in order to squeak out every additional basis point we can get from a returns perspective to make sure that we’re keeping up with those rising expectations. The primary way that we’ve seen firms really managing portfolios from a tax-optimized perspective is obviously asset location, which is a big part of it. And then the other piece is more dynamic tax optimization strategies like tax loss harvesting, really great strategies on the direct indexing side, the theory and technology that existed for a long, long time and been implemented for a long, long time. But we’ve seen a lot more education around and a lot more uptick of more recently. But there’s also even down-market tax optimized solutions when we start talking about SMAs and fractional share SMAs as well. I think that that’s really become more democratized over time. The talent for asset managers, at least from my perspective, is inherent in one of the questions that you would ask later in that, which is, well, what do wealth managers want? What do advisors want? What are the types of technologies that are being rolled out? Because the answer to that is super complicated and varies platform to platform, where if you look at one of the big, you know, some of the big wire platforms, some of the big independent platforms, maybe they want to bring more onto platform where, you know, they’re managing the tax optimization, managing the asset location. They’re even managing the direct index solutions that sit on top of some of their core office. Whereas when you look at even some of the same wire firms, or you look at certainly the mid-market long tail of the RIA channel, they need partners to be able to help manage things because we just don’t have the same centralized presence today. And so, you know, they’re looking for something fundamentally different where they need partners, they need firms that they can outsource that type of solution to. And so there’s really no one answer to that question. A lot of it is the product market. Who is the right advisor and panel to sell my products through… to market? And then how do I find the right partners, vendors, outsourcers in order to deliver that experience to investors via advisors?
Jack Sharry: So Ashley, I want to play off of what Tim was saying. Personally, I spent much of my career on this topic, so I’m a little bit biased, but I also am not wrong. And that is to really maximize tax alpha, you got to coordinate multiple accounts in a tax efficient way. We’re seeing more and more, and my question, Ashley, is what are you seeing out there? Where are we in the process? But certainly for what we do at SEI LifeYield, that’s fundamentally what we do is how do you manage multiple accounts tax efficiently, including DI, direct indexing, including ETFs, SMAs, all the rest of them. But how do you coordinate that tax loss harvesting, rebalancing, income generation, it goes on and on. And that’s hard and we know the marketplace well. We’ll just say it’s early days of where that’s going, but I’d love to have you comment about what you’re seeing and also specifically what you’re finding in the research, is this something you’re going to be exploring further? Talk a little bit about that.
Ashley Wood: Yeah. I mean, this is maybe the pivot towards AI and technology, right? I mean, that’s the core driver of a lot of this. I mean, just to put a point on a couple of the comments Tim made, the other big dynamic here as well is that the wealth managers are increasingly looking to do more and more with fewer and fewer asset manager partners, right? And that’s been a trend here as well. So it’s this concept of how do I better leverage technology and manage decreasing margins, this need for increased, tailorization, customization and scale, but also be an indispensable partner and be able to kind of meet every client where they are at that point. Right. So there’s a lot sort of going on under the hood there. We are certainly seeing from a sort of product assets perspective of… this is playing out more quickly. We’re seeing more familiarity with direct indexing and other more nuanced, more complex sort of tax optimized solutions than before. So the advisor, familiarity level, comfort level, the adoption level, while it is still more wirehouse centric, the general direction of travel is one of increasing familiarity and adoption. And then the investor needs, I would say, and the advisor needs clearly spell that out. Where we, of course, we see low cost always as sort of a top cry for, you know, investments. They want things to be less expensive and better on the margins. But tax efficiency really no matter how you slice the data has been a core. I think it’s just a more obvious and recognized component of this and firms are really rallying around that knowing they need to have the right technology, the right tools, but also the right education and the right narratives in play as to why are they the provider to best serve there.
Jack Sharry: Yeah. So it seems to me that what we’re talking about is sort of where the future of wealth management goes. And one of the challenges, and Tim, if you’d comment on this, is that probably the multi-account, the UMH, the Unified Managed Household orientation, which just seems clearly where we’re going as an industry, not seems… we are clearly going there just because I talk to enough people that are working on this stuff, that’s where the world is going. And it’s hard. As we say, both of you are from the Boston area, it’s wicked hard to pull that off. So I’d love to hear from you, Tim, what’s your observation around that? How does this play out? Because it probably needs to reside at the wealth manager for them to really manage it there. What’s the role of the asset manager in that regard? Certainly to provide product, I understand that part. But how do they enable this more multi-account kind of approach? What does that look like from where… what you’re seeing, what you saw the research, what you’re thinking about?
Tim Kresl: Yeah. So I think it requires much, much closer partnership between asset and wealth managers from a solutions delivery perspective moving forward, because there’s so many different flavors of investment intellectual property delivery, essentially, right? Whether it’s being delivered through direct index solution, an SMA, a mutual fund, an ETF, a CIT, all of it depends on the individual use case, the platform in question, the client base, what have you. And so I think that necessitates a really, really solid understanding across the two groups of their needs, their expectations, and the desired outcomes associated with those things. And so that’s going to require partnership, not only at the home office level in a way that we haven’t necessarily seen historically where it was very transactional historically, right? I want my fund added to the investment platform. We’re going to go through a defined process to do that. Maybe I’m going to get on the select list, what have you. Now it’s those conversations are starting much earlier stage, which is co-product development, righ, co-branding in many cases, multi-party partnerships, we see a lot of that in private markets right now. And I think the world is going to evolve to more and more of those conversations in order to deliver more optimized solutions to end clients. That’s going to be difficult because that’s a very different paradigm than we’ve been in the past. But I think ultimately it’s going to lead to the for all of our collective clients with their end investors at the end of the day.
Jack Sharry: Great. I get it. So our time grows short and Ashley, you get to bring it home because we shoot for 25 minutes. We’re close to that mark as we speak. But I’d love to have you… We’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve got into AI a little bit, which I appreciate your doing that. Thank you for making this podcast current. And we didn’t touch so much on the demographics, but I’d love to have you talk, maybe wrap up what you guys are seeing, thinking, hearing, some big takeaways because I think it’s fair to say what we’re talking about is if you’re going to improve outcome, everyone’s thinking tax optimization is part of that and it includes products as well as platform or tools or solutions or whatever, call them what you will. But help us take it on home, maybe capturing what your thoughts are on all we’ve discussed.
Ashley Wood: Sure, yeah, so there’s a number of topics frankly that we covered in the survey that we would need a lot more than 25 minutes to do all those… So if we think about it, and Tim and I have sort of thought about this through four key lenses, I’ll talk a little bit about product and AI. I do think we should at least give a little bit a take there. Product though, we’ve talked a lot about the flight to tax efficiency, the flight to customization at scale. One other piece that I do think is worth noting and at risk of introducing a somewhat new topic in the final minutes here. I did want to at least just address the elephant in the room with some of the newer topics around, and again, this leads back to operational efficiency and technology as well. But ETFs as a share class was a big topic that came up on this year’s survey as well. And we certainly have opened Pandora’s box at this point. There’s been approvals. Many have filed. I would say there’s just a sort of cautious approach playing out from the asset manager audience and some trepidation from the wealth manager audience in particular, just around the operational complexity and implementation hurdles of that. So that does tie in. I mean, that’s certainly related to the flight to tax efficiency, but also underscores the importance of the operational side and the technology spend and the focus associated with that. And then just quickly from an AI perspective, it is worth noting we’ve really moved rapidly in the last year in just a very short period of time for more of an exploration phase, if you will, to much more of an execution. This is a core business priority for me. So we saw more than a 2x lift in just asset and wealth manager conviction on this as being a business priority. This is the area of the survey where we saw the most alignment, frankly, which is a good thing, between asset and wealth managers, very widespread belief that this needs to be leveraged effectively. But worth noting, this is not easy. I think as anyone who’s familiar with it knows and firms are still very much concerned about regulatory and compliance issues, but also the legacy tech stacks, right? Legacy data infrastructure in play at most… How do you get the house in order, so to speak, from a data perspective before you advance to some of the more forward looking AI use cases. We’re still in very back office, almost automated use case territory, but rapidly looking to move towards more front office applications of AI.
Jack Sharry: We’re gonna have to have you guys back. There’s too much to cover.
Ashley Wood: I’m teasing too much at the end here, but then Tim has his takeaways as well.
Jack Sharry: You’re doing your job. This is good work. I like it. But I especially want to come back to the operational aspect, because it’s one thing to talk about what you ought to do, but given the complexity of what we’re discussing, you’ve got to have some technology and operational heft, skill, wherewithal, experience to pull that off. So we will definitely have that conversation because I think it’s one of those things that we don’t talk enough about, and all of us are looking at this AI thing, trying to figure out what it means. But unless you have the operational underpinnings of that, your AI can take you so far, but it can’t take you where you really want to go. So it’s my view, and we spend a lot of time on this with what we do. It’s fundamental. AI without the operational execution is just a buzzword. Or helps with incrementally in terms of be more efficient, but a whole ‘nother topic. So thank you for what we’ve covered so far. Tease to the rest of our listeners. We’ll be back. There’s a lot here and we’re going to be talking about this in the coming year. We’re recording here toward the end, at the end of 25, but my prediction, personal prediction, next year will all be about coordinating public and private markets, tax optimization, AI, and whatever else we didn’t talk about that probably belongs in here, but you got to figure out how to have that all work together. And as it stands now, they’re kind of more disconnected, I think, than they will be. I’ll leave it at that. So with that all said, Tim, I’m going turn to you. Two questions left for each of you. First question of the final questions. What are some key takeaways? Maybe talk about a couple things that are critical and, Ashley, I’m gonna ask you the same. So what are the key takeaways with what we’ve talked about and maybe tease what we might talk about next time through.
Tim Kresl: So I would highlight two things. The first is the tax optimization point, tax optimization critical. We spent a lot of time there. The second point that we’ve also touched on is complexity of partnerships in the future state. We’ve touched a little on that as well. As things get more complicated, as we become more solutions focused, it requires more specialized skill sets. It’s the reason that we see asset managers adding so many product and kind of subject matter specialists and experts to their distribution staff. It’s the reason that wealth managers say they want those types of resources more so than anything else. I think we’re gonna see that continue to proliferate as well.
Jack Sharry: Great, great. Ashley, how about you?
Ashley Wood: Yeah. So at risk of, don’t want to repeat the, the entire spiel on AI, but certainly that’s a thread that it’s very fast evolving. Belief and trust in data that is produced from AI is higher than it ever has been. I would also note that the advisor use case is more pronounced than we’ve seen. So we interview, as I mentioned, advisors at Broadridge as well. And in our most recent set of data, which is a month or two old at this point, we’re seeing much higher levels of advisor adoption of AI for their business purposes. So this is certainly a rapidly evolving trend to be aware of, but I would a hundred percent agree, Jack, with the point you made around getting the sort of data infrastructure and perhaps the less sexy side of the house in order before you try to plug AI. The other piece is just the role of the advisor, I would say, continues to evolve very rapidly. I know we talk a lot in this industry about impending wealth transfer and when the sort of other shoe will drop so to speak but the next-gen investors are becoming harder and harder to ignore at this point. There’s a higher level of service and personalization and expectations associated with that.
Jack Sharry: Well, you’ve done a wonderful job of making sure we get back together to have the… all these are fascinating topics and we’ll definitely spend some time on both. So thank you both for that. One final question going out to each of you. Ashley, we’ll mix it up. I’m going to call on you first, if I may. What do you do outside of work that others might find surprising that you’re particularly passionate or excited about? So fill us in, what do you do when you’re not talking about all this stuff?
Ashley Wood: Well, as Tim knows probably better than most, my last couple of years, because he hears about this all the time from me, I am in the throes of raising very young children. So free time is at a minimum these days.
Jack Sharry: What’s that?
Ashley Wood: Exactly. But when I do have free time, I’ve been an avid ice hockey player actually my entire life. You know, the Boston blood runs deep, I suppose, but I was essentially born on ice skates, played competitively all through high school, all through college. I’m now in an interesting spot where I get to see it kind of come full circle. I have two young boys and I’m the coach, I guess you could call it, for learn to skate for my four-year-old. So instead of scoring goals, I’m picking toddlers up off the ice, but it’s been really fun to just see that play out full circle.
Jack Sharry: That’s great. Good for you. Love to hear that. Tim, how about you?
Tim Kresl: So I’ll give a timely one. So you mentioned we’re recording this near the end of 2025. So I’ve got two young kids as well. I’ve got a seven-year-old and a four-year-old. And when my daughter was very young, we first started building a Christmas village from Legos. We bought this fun Lego set that was all Christmassy. And then COVID came and we probably went overboard a little bit. And now we’re in the holiday season, we have an absolutely ridiculous Lego Christmas village that we set up and now my son’s involved in it and it’s a tremendous amount of fun. So I spend a lot of my free time right now playing Legos with my kids.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, that’s great. Good for you. It’s wonderful. I’m of a different generation and I have sons that are closer to where you guys reside in the age thing. And one my sons is teaching his nephew the wonders of LEGO. So it doesn’t disappear. So wonderful to hear. So to be continued, there’s lots here. We’ve ust scratched the surface, so we’ll have to do this some more. So thank you both for the conversation. It was really wonderful. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Thanks for listening to what we have to offer. More to come. If you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we do here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All our episodes are there along with blogs and curated content from many folks around the industry. Thank you again, Tim and Ashley. This has been a lot of fun. Really learned a lot. Enjoyed our conversation very much.
Tim Kresl: Thanks, Jack. Appreciate it.
